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Koestler�s Bumpy Journey
Stuart Schoffman
 A BLACK BELT IN JEWISH SELF-HATRED: For Koestler, it was Jews who caused anti-Semitism |
(August 14, 2000) Just as Arthur Koestler searched for a �theory of everything� late in his career, his biographer strives to present a total picture of the tormented author�s life.
David Cesarani's exhaustive � and exhausting � biography of the Hungarian-born writer Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) has something for almost every reader. Admirers of Koestler�s classic anti-totalitarian novel �Darkness at Noon� (published in 1940, and voted eighth best novel of the century by a panel of literary lions in 1998), who are intrigued by its author�s bumpy journey from zealous young Communist and crusading journalist of the Spanish Civil War, during which he was jailed by Franco�s forces and sentenced to be shot, to 1950s cold warrior and leading light of the anti-Communist Congress for Cultural Freedom � which Koestler knew, but most of his colleagues didn�t, was a front for the CIA � will find that story here.
Alternatively, readers drawn to the latter phase of the protean Koestler�s career, when he applied his formidable talent to such topics as astronomy, evolutionary biology, extra-sensory perception and the nature of creativity, seeking till the end of his life (which he notoriously took by his own hand, together with his much younger wife Cynthia) to unify these fields, along with politics, into a grand �theory of everything� � will be pleased that this too has its place in Cesarani�s sprawling, meticulously researched chronicle.
Aficionados of celebrity �scatography� � the digging up of every available bit of dirt about the biographer�s subject � may be the readers most gratified by this book, especially as Cesarani, a professor of modern Jewish history at Southampton University in England, confers a scholarly imprimatur upon a genre more usually associated with sports legends and movie stars. Did you know that Koestler disliked children, forced his wives and lovers to have abortions, and sired an illegitimate daughter whom he never recognized? That he raped the wife of his friend, British Labor MP Michael Foot? That he slept with Bertrand Russell�s wife Patricia (known to friends as �Peter�)? You do now. And if you would like to know much more about Koestler�s staggering sexual promiscuity, vomit-stained drunken binges, pathologically frequent automobile accidents and periodic suicide attempts, by all means read this book and wonder, as I did, just why Cesarani, a skillful and polished historian, took the trouble to write such a hopelessly long book about such an awful, cruel, hypocritical man.
On the surface, the answer to that question is plain: Koestler, as Cesarani energetically argues, is also a striking case study in the modern Jewish condition. The only child of secular bourgeois parents, Koestler joined a Jewish fraternity, avidly embraced Zionism, and went off in the 1920s to Palestine, where he quickly discovered that collective farming (at Kvutzat Heftzi-Bah) was not for him. He served � now here�s a �did you know� that is worth knowing � as Vladimir Jabotinsky�s personal secretary in 1924, and remained a member of the Revisionist camp and an apologist, in the 1940s, for the violent tactics of the Irgun and the Stern gang. Whereas Rubashov, the protagonist of �Darkness at Noon,� categorically rejects the use of violence to attain political goals, for Koestler, Jewish statehood was an end that justified such means. In Cesarani�s well-chosen words: �It was a breathtaking volte-face.�
Koestler�s capacity to swing from Communism to right-wing Zionism to left-wing anti-Communism, observes Cesarani, stemmed from the fact that he was �by nature a rebel, not a revolutionary.� This keen formulation, which Koest-ler himself acknowledged, would seem to be an ample skeleton key to the man who emerges from Cesarani�s pages. Short, defiant, brilliant, pugnacious, incurably restless and insecure � this was Koestler, exemplar of a certain male type also to be found among Jews. Yet Cesarani goes further still, insisting that it was Koestler�s radical ambivalence about his Judaism that was the organizing principle of his turbulent life.
The critical passage from Koestler�s writing that underlies Cesarani�s analysis is the epilogue of �Promise and Fulfillment: Palestine 1947-49,� which was published in 1949, reissued in 1983, and remains an intriguing mash of brilliant insight and breathtaking prejudice. For two millennia, wrote Koestler, Jews prayed for a return to Zion: �[T]he logical consequence of the fulfillment of a prayer is that one ceases to repeat it... [I]f the mystic yearning for the return to Palestine is eliminated from the Jewish faith,� wrote Koestler, �its very foundations and essence will have gone.� The establishment of Israel, in his view, meant that Jews who do not move there have no reason, need, excuse or even right to maintain a separate and distinct Jewish identity, which in the Diaspora had perennially engendered persecution. �The existence of the Hebrew State,� he wrote, �puts every Jew outside Israel before a dilemma which will become increasingly acute. It is the choice between becoming a citizen of the Hebrew nation and renouncing any conscious or implicit claim to separate nationhood.�
Here was the classical Zionist �negation of the Diaspora,� carried to an absurd extreme. After 1948, argues Cesarani, Koestler the Central European refugee practiced what he preached, choosing renunciation over aliyah, but such radical denial was doomed to failure: �For the harder Koestler tried not to be a Jew, the more he accentuated what it was that set him apart. In the second half of his life, the suppression of Jewishness was a conscious act that colored everything else he was or did. The attempt to flee Judaism was the quintessential act of the modern Jew: it was, itself, a badge of identity.�
Cesarani bases this claim of methodical �suppression,� in large measure, upon a careful deconstruction of Koestler�s autobiographical books, in which he consistently downplayed or obscured his Jewish origins. In his memoir �The Invisible Writing� (1954), Koestler remarked that he hadn�t intended Rubashov of �Darkness at Noon� to be a Jew, which Cesarani considers �implausible� � noting that the editor of the Hebrew daily Davar in the 1920s, when Koestler lived in Palestine, was Schneur Zalman Rubashov, who later became Israel�s president Shazar.
It is just such attention to detail, however, that ultimately undermines Cesarani�s book. In his tireless effort to peel away Koestler�s self-mythologizing and reveal the unvarnished facts of his life, the author accumulated a monumental staggering mass of information, only some of which is worth sharing with the reader.
Koestler was both a wanderer and a charmer. His friends over the years, we are impressed to learn, included such 20th-century eminences as George Orwell, Andr� Malraux, Timothy Leary, Teddy Kollek, American historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the African American poet Langston Hughes (with whom he toured Soviet Central Asia in 1932), and the English novelist Henry Green (an anti-Semite to whom Koestler was drawn, speculates Cesarani, in order to be reminded that he was a Jew).
Koestler�s postwar sojourn in Paris, where he drank himself silly with the Existentialists, derided Jean-Paul Sartre�s loyalty to Russia and had a pathetic one-night stand with his companion Simone de Beauvoir � and Albert Camus ran off for a week to Provence with Koestler�s lover (later his second wife), Mamaine Paget � is one of the more engrossing episodes in the book. �There wasn�t any place on earth where he really felt at home,� wrote de Beauvoir of Koestler in her novel �The Mandarins,� where he is rendered fictionally as a character called Scriassine. �That probably was the reason for his immense vanity: since he had no homeland, no one to stand up for him but himself, he needed always to reassure himself that somewhere in the world his name meant something.�
Unfortunately, other chapters in Koestler�s life that Cesarani chronicles with similar diligence are vastly less edifying. Thus we are needlessly informed of the scheduling difficulties attending Koestler�s 1968 lecture tour to Australia; his desperate quest for alcohol in Salt Lake City, April 1948; and a visit to the dentist in London in late September 1947. Koestler�s mother survived the Budapest ghetto; he rode out the war in London, where in 1943, writes Cesarani, �he continued to combine a frenetic social life with political and literary figures by night and hard pounding at the typewriter by day. Among those he saw most regularly were his literary agent A.D. Peters, Connolly, Crossman, Gordon Walker, Laski, Gollancz, Kingsley Martin, E.M. Forster, Kenneth Clark, Storm Jameson, Alexander Korda, Miriam Rothschild, and Chaim Weizmann.�
Sterile recitations like this one are all too frequent here, at the expense, ironically, of the fruits of that hard-pounded typewriter. Koestler�s greatest strength was his way with English words, a gift all the more remarkable considering that this was not his native tongue. Cesarani rightly lauds Koestler as above all a journalist of genius, but systematically reduces his body of work to bloodless summaries and staccato sound bites that dissolve into the welter of names, dates and places. One would surely expect, given Cesarani�s thematic focus, more generous quotation from Koestler�s three books on Jewish issues, namely �Thieves in the Night,� his 1946 novel set in Palestine; the aforementioned �Promise and Fulfillment�; and Koestler�s last major project, �The Thirteenth Tribe� (1976), a quixotic attempt to prove that most of the world�s Jews were descended from the Khazars. For Cesarani, these books serve to demonstrate Koestler�s alienation from his roots and his harsh, utilitarian Zionism: �Jewry is a sick race... I became a Hebrew because I hated the Yid,� says Joseph, the central character of �Thieves in the Night.� �Most significantly, he described Judaism as �a perpetuum mobile for generating anti-Semitism,�� writes Cesarani of Koestler�s animus in �Promise and Fulfillment.�
Clearly Koestler was a black belt in Jewish self-hatred, but Cesarani�s readers would have been better served if he had dropped a few dozen of Koestler�s drinking buddies in favor of such eloquent, perceptive passages as this one, from �Promise and Fulfillment�:
�[I]n the particular case of Jewish Palestine, expectations are quite out of keeping with reality, and here cultural factors play a sometimes decisive part in shaping political destiny. This, indeed, is the core of the problem of Israel�s relations with the outside world. The tourist who embarks for New Zealand or the American Middle West knows more or less what to expect and risks no shock of disappointment. But the stranger to Israel, whether diplomat or journalist, has, partly, through the fault of an over-zealous Zionist propaganda, a completely wrong picture in his mind. He expects something in the vein of picturesque Maccabeans fighting under palm trees in a kind of Max Reinhardt production, while prospective Freuds and Einsteins play chess in the caf� round the corner. The fact is that... [Israel] is both a hard pioneer country and a bitter refugee country, disillusioned by experience, stubbornly fighting for life, with an aching void in its past and an interrogation mark for its future. The muses and social graces are still under embargo; most of the things which make life attractive and worth living are for tomorrow.�
Koestler's "failure to integrate all the parts of his personality and his past in either his writing or his life,� concludes Cesarani, �may account for the permanent sense of unease, and the questing for identity and belonging that afflicted his politics, as well as his relationships, with chronic instability.� Probably so, but I also suspect that Koestler was more appreciative of the fertile, ironic dialectic of Jewish myth and reality than is convenient for Cesarani to believe. In the first chapter of �Promise and Fulfillment,� he wrote presciently of �the clash between the romantic plane of history on which the Balfour Declaration and the renaissance of Israel were originally conceived, and the trivial plane of political routine.� Cesarani�s �Arthur Koestler� may have been conceived as a dark romance of ideas, but its grand ambitions are drowned in trivial pursuits.
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